The Emerging Platform Economy is the new way to do business. Legacy business models are asymptotically doomed. But: What shape will the elimination of the information brokering layer assume? The p2p ubiquity – p2p credit, Hayek Money, p2p economy with… Read More ›
Technology
Chomsky & Hobsbawm or: Homage to Catalonia
Let’s start again with late Tony Judt’s comment about Eric Hobsbawm autobiography, where one can read the following: Eric Hobsbawm is decidedly a man of order, a “Tory communist,” as he puts it. Communist intellectuals were never “cultural dissidents”; and… Read More ›
On mandarins and epistemological fallacies
Reading late Tony Judt’s appraisal of Eric Hobsbawm autobiography, one meets a very interesting remark: Eric Hobsbawm is decidedly a man of order, a “Tory communist,” as he puts it. Communist intellectuals were never “cultural dissidents”; and Hobsbawm’s scorn for… Read More ›
Problems with the Objective Function: the Monkey Pawn
Nick Bostrom, in a wonderful Ted Talk (below), muses about the problem of emerging superintelligence within the human society, so far calibrated to the distribution of biological brains. From the village idiot to Ed Witten. In “God and Golem”, Wiener evocatively… Read More ›
Community life and chipped silicon
“If you open a modern computer case and stare at the mother board, it really appears like downtown Detroit” (the image above is aptly a painting by computer pioneer Konrad Zuse). This insightful comment by a friend of mine conceals… Read More ›
Artificial Photosynthesis: some social implications of technology
The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenathen invented the first historic monotheism, according to Freud’s Moses and Monotheismus (1939). Sensibly, the sun was the God, worshipped as the true generator of life in this planet. Everything we have depends on the constant flow… Read More ›
A. Burgess: “Clockwork Condition”. A tale on Skinner and Free Will
The real polemic target of Anthony Burgess in The Clockwork Condition (The New Yorker) (here the Italian translation) was Skinner and behaviorism. It reminds me of some studies of José Delgado, the brilliant physiologist who implanted electrodes in animal brains to… Read More ›
Engineering initial conditions (some words of thanks)
The human civilization stumbled first upon metric geometry (the Greeks), then it invented projective geometry (Italian Renaissance) and finally conquered topology (the XIX century), as the study of continuous transformations. See the master himself, here. The human being, in his/her… Read More ›
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Cosmism
It appears to me that a single idea transpires through Isaac Asimov’s “New Guide to Science”, Carl Sagan’s book “Cosmos” and many more: this idea is Cosmism. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a true legend, the inventor of astronautic and a pioneer… Read More ›
Human and Horses
Human are not horses, says MIT economist Kenneth Rogoff and King Ludd is still dead. But Keynes thought differently, advancing the hypothesis of technological unemployment and another Nobel caliber academic, Leontieff, wrote an insightful article advancing the hypothesis that it… Read More ›
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